Ride London’s abandoned underground “Mail Rail”

Before e-mail, London had a different kind of network.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK; you can see a full gallery of the wonders of the British Postal Museum & Archive there.

An underground railway that was formerly used to transport post across London is to be converted into a ride for members of the public.

The Post Office Underground Railway—AKA the Mail Rail—was the world's first driverless electric railway. It launched in 1927 and was used to transport tons of post from one side of London to another, with stops at large railway hubs such as Liverpool Street and Paddington Station, where post could be collected and offloaded for transportation around the rest of the country.

"Mail Rail is like the Tube in miniature. You can't understand the scale until you get down there," Harry Huskisson, the British Postal Museum & Archive's communications manager, tells Wired.co.uk.

The idea is to create special battery-powered passenger carriages to take people from the car depot and some of the tunnels in a one-kilometer loop. Visitors will be taken 70-feet underground, through Mount Pleasant Station, and will stop to view audiovisual displays recounting the history of the network and what it was like to work down there.

In addition to seeing impressive feats of industrial age engineering such as thick metal flood doors, visitors will be able to see snippets of history spanning a century.

"It's quite eerie," Huskisson says, "In the car depot you can see lockers with shower gels and newspapers from the day it closed. It's a microcosm of history. But you will also see bars of soap from the 1950s, maps, messages, and notices and signs from the 1930s."

It's also incredibly quiet down there. "In the six years I've lived in London, it's the only place that I've experienced complete silence," he adds.

The railways have a 61cm gauge (the width of the track), on top of which small carriages traveled without drivers thanks to electric live rails. In the stations there are two tracks, with carriages going in each direction.

The service continued to operate until 2003, when it was closed down—it had become much cheaper to transport mail by road.

Since then, the trains and the tunnels have remained in place, but the goal is to turn a portion of the network into this public ride as part of plans to build a new National Postal Museum, which have just been approved by Islington Council.

The museum will be at Calthorpe House and will feature an eclectic archive including obvious artifacts such as pillarboxes and stamp collections, but also more unusual items such as telegrams relating to the sinking of the Titanic—a Royal Mail ship—and a Victoria Cross that was awarded to Alfred Knight, a post office employee who distinguished himself in battle in France during World War I. There is also a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses that was intercepted by the Post Office, since it was banned for obscene content in the 1920s.

Some of the most wonderful items in the collection include sick notes for horses (in Victorian times, Post Office animals had to be signed off sick) and employment records for cats, which were brought in to ward off mice.

There are also a couple of cars from the pneumatic railway—a Hyperloop-esque post transmission system that was powered by pneumatic air pressure—and a five-wheeled Victorian bicycle called a pentacycle that was another experiment that never took off.

"It goes to show how bureaucratic the Post Office was in late Victorian times. They needed cats to handle the mice problem, and they ended up 'hiring' them and giving them employee numbers. The cats were given a salary and pensioned off when they retired," Huskisson explains. The last active cat employee came out of service in the 1970s; "Tibbs the Great" (see gallery) served for 15 years.

The British Postal Museum & Archive is currently raising funding for both the museum and the underground ride. If all goes well, work should start on the museum in summer of this year, while work on the Mail Rail will start in November.